With the recent changes to Str and carrying capacity, I think it would make sense to look at individual items and re-evaluate how much some things should weigh.

I'm thinking Food should become standardized in terms of weight vs. nutrition value, with honeycombs / royal jellies being the exception and having a higher nutrition than other game foods as they are typically found as a reward for exploring Hive. Additionally, I feel rations weigh too much in general under the new, stricter weight limits. A tiered system of nutrition values could be nice:

Rations, taking the longest, would have a 1:1000 weight to nutrition ratio, putting Meat at 5 aum, Bread at 4.4 aum.

Snacks, being the fastest, would be more like a 1:2000 ratio.

Honeycomb and Royal Jelly could share the 1:1000 ratio that rations do while retaining the speed of snacks.

Chunks - they do not need to weigh 10 aum. They take longer to eat than snacks, but due to their wider availability I would be in favor of giving them a 1:2000 ratio, reducing their weight to 2 aum (same as Snacks, below). The primary limiter of chunks is not weight, it is their expiration timer. You rarely carry more than 1 chunk at a time (as most chars) because it is unlikely you will become hungry enough to eat 2 before the 2nd has expired, so the huge weight in aum is more annoying than limiting or tactically interesting. Meanwhile Ghouls are punished more than other races because their primary food weighs 10 aum each and they are encouraged to keep it in their inventory long enough to rot as opposed to just eating chunks as they explore as most races do.

Having standardized this, it will be much easier to tell at a glance how much nutritional value the food in your inventory provides, making planning and management of food more transparent and user friendly. This would be most noticable on snacks, as there are many different kinds and it can be difficult to get a sense (without getting a calculator) of how much nutrition you actually have when you have oranges, pears, chokos, and a pile of sultanas in your inventory.

Additionally, it may be a good idea to re-evaluate the nutritional value of some foods, such as making Bread Rations worth 4000 and Meat worth 6000, allowing players to manage which type / how many they want to carry based on how much nutrition they think they'll need to clear a given area (assuming they do not have special dietary needs).

Finally, it would be nice if the bonuses / penalties for being a herbivore / carnivore were standardized as well, say 10% per level of mutation. The bonuses / penalties already do stack per level of mutation so this would not change that aspect, just make it more consistent.

A full table of current values and ratios is located in the lower 3/4 of this: http://r1gm.free.fr/Crawl/crawlSS_052_food.txt

Runes of Zot could have a look over, has been discussed before I dont know how far it got. Currently at 10aum, would be good to decrease to 5aum perhaps? — porkchop 2010-02-20 00:40